Source of arguably the purest fresh water in the Outer Rim Territories, Illarreen II is a beautiful, if frigid, world of sparkling, pristine glaciers and almost equally beautiful quartz rock fields. First discovered along with its sister planets as recently as a half-century before the onset of the Clone Wars, the world was rapidly explored and found to have a commercial resource that could both be easily exploited as well as be present in incredible abundance: the ice from its world-girding glaciers. Kilometres deep, these cobalt blue ice fields, formed over billions of years, have ground the substrate and absorbed countless millions of salts and minerals from the planet’s bedrock.
The dissolved minerals in the ice have been found to provide an exceptional natural nutritional value, which actually prompted a number of major pharmaceutical companies in the Inner Rim and Core Worlds to lobby for water from this world to be banned as it could seriously impact the sales of multivitamin and mineral supplements. With this almost unlimited resource on hand, the local and system governments have judiciously implemented ice extraction operations across the entire planet. Ice harvesting operations cover the planet’s surface, using droid-operated vehicles and automated packing facilities to package the ice for shipment throughout the Outer Rim. Intensive marketing has even seen this "miracle ice" making inroads in Mid Rim markets. Early extraction efforts were less sustainable than current operations and resulted in the exposure of large areas of rock. Modern operations attempt to ensure that the ice extraction does not wear through to the planet’s bedrock.
For an ice world, Illarreen II’s climate is relatively forgiving, with average temperatures around ten degrees below the freezing point of water. Wind speeds tend to be low as the world is universally cold and blizzards are quite rare, meaning that the few population centres can be quite economically shielded against the elements. This helps increase profit margins from the ice extraction operations, a fact appreciated by the corporations running them. These corporations have virtually wiped out all higher life forms on the planet in an effort to maximise the purity of the ice and avoid pollution from any biological sources. The only higher animal lifeforms found on the planet are non-native species imported as pets or as sources of meat for the small population of workers that stay on the planet year-round.